• Hui Jiang, Yifan Liu, and Zheng Su.
• Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.
• Contemp Clin Trials. 2008 Mar 1; 29 (2): 102-8.

AbstractNumerous phase I dose finding clinical trials are conducted everyday to find the "maximum tolerated dose" (MTD) of a cancer treatment. Although various Bayesian designs for Phase I clinical trials have been proposed in the literature, the traditional 3+3 design is still widely used because of its algorithm-based simplicity in logistics for the clinical investigators to carry out in comparison with model-based Bayesian methods. In this paper, we propose an optimization algorithm for designing phase I cancer clinical trials. This algorithm does not need assumptions on the true dose-response relationship but can readily incorporate available prior information about the true response probabilities. It searches for an approximately optimal design within a design space, in which the 3+3 design is included as a special case. Simulation studies show that the design recommended by this algorithm significantly outperforms the 3+3 design.

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